Listen while you read to “Kyojo Renka” (loose translation: “Love Song of a Crazy Girl”) from “10 Strings” by the Panache Orchestra

Thursday, Sept. 23, 2011

It was near the end of an especially grueling and stressful week in which I’d been in the throes of bringing a new drummer on board for our band (I say “I”, instead of “we” because although Chi calls all the shots, I have to jump through all the hoops to make it all work, and this process involves having to learn a few new circus tricks on the fly, while greatly increasing my capacity and efficiency with old ones. Blog about this coming soon), so sleep has been hard to come by lately; day job activity level is increasing, and after a post-day-job rehearsal from 7-10 Wednesday night followed by being up until 0200h dealing with the film we shot of the rehearsal (i.e., feeding it to the computer, playing it back, dumping it into my audio editing program to cut it up and send the individual audio clips to the drummer to review before the show this Sunday, and then burn a DVD for Chi and me to review, etc.), I was rather knackered by the time I got home from work yesterday (Thursday), which was so busy that I didn’t even have a chance to eat.

Anyhoo, I took a quick nap, and then Chi and I sat down to have appetizers before doing our daily Panache rehearsal. It started out amicably enough, and then he abruptly started up at me with some hysterical thing about a huge satellite that was supposed to come crashing to Earth sometime the next day (Friday), telling me that I should take the day off in case it lands in L.A. I tried to gently parry this one and keep eating, as I was absolutely starving, but he persisted, switching to another hysterical trauma-drama about an impending catastrophic devaluation of the US dollar, leading to cataclysmic hyper-inflation, and carrying on about how he wanted to convert our remaining cash into what he thought might be less vulnerable foreign currency, then demanded that I research manufacturers of air cleaners and vacuum cleaners that were publicly traded so we could invest in them. I know, that’s a total non-sequitur. This might be a Japanese thing, but I’d have to observe a larger sample size over a similar period of time in order to make anything like a definitive judgment about it.

By this point I was thoroughly annoyed and asked him as mildly and offhandedly as I could if he thought, just perhaps, that I didn’t have enough things to do already, and could he possibly get one of his Japanese friends to help him with that instead. That sent him flying off his hinges screaming and yelling, verbally abusing me, etc., so I just executed what has become my SOP whenever this situation occurs and got up from the table and withdrew to my (home) office and went to work.

He came in a few minutes later, bringing me my unfinished glass of wine, and said something like “So we’re not going to practice tonight, right?”, to which I calmly asked, “Is that your way of asking if I am ready to rehearse now?” (I’m trying to train him in a more effective way of communicating with me. Again, this might be a Japanese thing, but the jury’s still out.) He went back into histrionic tantrum mode, picking up my music stand and throwing it on the floor, and stormed out of the room. “Good fucking riddance, Douchebag!”, I thought.

However, I was intrigued about the satellite thing (been too busy to read the news lately), and did a quick search. Nothing much came up, but from what I did find, it appeared that something was headed on a collision course with Earth, although not expected to hit North America, and by the time it finished disintegrating upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the remaining intact chunks of it should not exceed 300 pounds or so. Irked that I had to spend time researching this non-disaster in order to debunk it, I went back to work wrangling rehearsal video footage, which ended up taking until 0200 a.m. again. The US dollar implosion fiasco is something I cannot do one single thing to mitigate in any way, even if it’s true, so I didn’t even bother looking into that. What-the-fuck-ever!

As the hours went on, I realized that there could be a potential major silver lining to this satellite ordeal. I wondered how the roof on our decrepit ghetto duplex would hold up to the impact of a 300-pound chunk of metal falling at whatever velocity things like that fall at (some complicated mathematical problem, I suppose), and thought that if one of those things hit our house in the right place, the resulting roof damage (and potential hole) would provide the perfect justification to install the skylight above the kitchen/bathroom/interior hallway that I have wanted ever since we moved into this place! And if the satellite chunk went all the way through and damaged the kitchen floor, then hey! Time (and easy justification) to re-do the kitchen floor too – woohoo! I see nothing but good coming of this!

From a relative’s comment to a FaceBook post I made about the satellite panic, I had one of those “whoa – that’s deep!” moments and realized what the problem is: I have a karmic issue with letting people torment me with their infatuations with lunacy, and I need to learn to see it for what it is and just let it go without getting worked up about their insistence on dragging me into their ridiculousness. That has to be why this scenario keeps playing out over and over and over – I keep failing the test! Now, to figure out how to not get worked up about it next time…..

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